Imagine a game of Magic: The Gathering. You have already decided to attack with a creature, but your fingers pause on the card. Your opponent still has a few untapped lands, and still has cards in hand. You do not know what is in there, but you know that everything may not necessarily resolve according to the power numbers in front of you.
Now imagine another evening. The dice in King of Tokyo have just settled, and the monster inside Tokyo has been wounded. Staying in can preserve that enticing payoff; stepping out at least leaves a chance to wait for the next time. Someone is looking at their own health, and someone has already reached for the dice.
On two imagined tables, there is a shared tension: you can calculate, but you cannot calculate the situation to death; you are making a decision, and the presence of others will change what that decision means. The person who brought these tensions to the tabletop is Richard Garfield.
People often first remember that Garfield created Magic: The Gathering. Today, let us also follow RoboRally and King of Tokyo to see which questions that designer has, again and again, placed on different tables.
1. Games first led him to mathematics, and mathematics did not finish writing the games for him
In Garfield's experience, mathematics and games did indeed meet very early. An interview published in an early issue of The Duelist introduced that he had studied computational mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, later worked at Bell Labs, then returned to school to study combinatorics, and afterward engaged in university teaching. The list of doctoral students left by his advisor Herbert Wilf on the University of Pennsylvania Mathematics Department website also records the name Richard Garfield and the year 1993.
But when faced with the question "why does a mathematics professor design games," the direction he gave is quite interesting: it is more likely that an interest in games led him to mathematics.
This sentence makes an overly convenient story stop. It is easy for us to imagine that a person skilled in complex calculation moved formulas onto cards and thereby created everything. But designing games also involves another kind of judgment: whether others are willing to keep playing, and whether a certain surprise is genuinely delightful or merely disappointing.
Calculating probabilities clearly does not automatically answer these questions.
In later interviews, Garfield also described the role of mathematics as quite limited. He would view a game as a whole system and think about what kind of behavior he wanted it to produce; but actual testing and hands-on revision remain irreplaceable.
Putting these two recollections together, I prefer to understand his professional foundation this way: he is curious about systems, yet unwilling to reduce experience to proof that a system already works. Rules can run correctly, and the game can still be unfun; an intuition can be very appealing, and it still needs to withstand repeated contact.
This is a path that works slowly. It allows ideas to be incomplete at first, allows prototypes to be set aside, and also allows old things to find new use in another question years later.
The card design that later changed his professional direction did not suddenly fall from a blank space. It retains a real connection with those attempts that had not yet become finished products.
2. A board game that failed to be negotiated turned the question in another direction
In a creation memoir he wrote himself and that was republished on the Wizards of the Coast official website, Garfield recounted the origins of Magic: The Gathering.
He and Mike Davis took RoboRally to meet Peter Adkison and others at Wizards of the Coast. The publisher at the time did not have the conditions to immediately produce this board game, but raised another need: was there a game with very few components, fast to play, and suitable for taking out between convention sessions?
This exchange brought him back to cards. The earlier Five Magics, other prototypes, and the inspiration from different abilities interacting in Cosmic Encounter all became materials for the later design.
What is worth distinguishing is that a direction can appear quickly, but a publishable game will not therefore automatically be completed. A person having their own deck means that the combinations players bring are not entirely pre-specified by the designer. The system must accommodate unfamiliar combinations and must also let them remain mutually understandable on the table.
Compared with tuning a box of fixed components into order, this adds another layer of difficulty.
For players, however, it opened a special space. The cards you bring to the table are not only tools randomly dealt into your hand; they also include choices you made before the game began. Before the game starts, thinking about this game has already happened.
What I like most about this turn is that both sides found a new possibility for the prototype. In Garfield's recollection, the publisher was very interested in RoboRally, but the conditions at the time were not yet sufficient for it to immediately become a product. By continuing to ask, the discussion provided new boundaries.
Boundaries sometimes make a work smaller, and sometimes force a work to take another shape. A plan about robots competing in a factory ultimately connected to a world that allows people to meet with their own cards.
Looking back, the finished product always seems natural, but what actually happened was that old materials were recombined under new requirements.
3. After a game ends, the game remains in conversation between people
Magic: The Gathering appeared in 1993. Its most distinctive change was not only that some castable spells appeared on the table, but also that players could choose their own decks and then let their respective choices meet.
In an ordinary game, lands provide mana, players pay costs, and cast creatures and other spells. The basic framework gives an unfamiliar card an understandable position, and the abilities on the card face cause that position to constantly generate new relationships.
In terms of experience, surprise does not necessarily come from how strong a card is. It may also be that two things that look ordinary separately suddenly acquire a new use when put together. You think you already know a certain card, but another player uses it to do something different.
This kind of discovery changes what people do after leaving the table. You may still be thinking about whether that card you did not draw last time was really necessary; you may also, while organizing your deck, remember a combination a friend showed you. A game thus becomes material for the next preparation.
In early interviews, Garfield regarded trading, discussing strategy, and talking about cards as important parts of this game. Two people sitting down to clash is a game that can be described on its own; the continuous exchange of information and ideas between people constitutes a larger play environment.
Here there is a very appealing openness: the designer has not pre-written the story of every game. The choices players bring will become the environment to which others must respond next time.
This openness also makes conditions beyond the cards important. Which cards everyone can obtain, what intensity of game they hope to play, and whether they like the same rhythm will all affect the outcome of the encounter. Preparing a deck is both a personal choice and something that needs to be understood by placing it back into the shared play environment.
For the same table, the more practical question remains: can what we each bring allow both sides to obtain a game they are willing to participate in?
I think the inspiration Magic: The Gathering leaves here is more enduring than "more cards." It hands part of the creative space to players and also makes players face each other more seriously. You are not optimizing against a fixed puzzle; rather, you take your own ideas to contact another person's ideas.
Decks are reorganized, experience is reunderstood; that game world thus continues to change before the next meeting.
4. Let robots execute plans, and also let plans reveal their own blind spots
Now turn your gaze back to RoboRally. It did not, because of the birth of Magic: The Gathering, retain only the role of a "prequel."
This is a racing game in which cards are used to arrange robot actions and pass checkpoints in order. Conveyor belts, pits, lasers, and other robots make the route full of surprises. You do not decide the direction anew with every step; instead, you hand over a segment of actions first and then see how it is executed in the shared factory.
If you look only at the subject matter, robots seem as if they should be synonymous with precision. But players quickly discover that precise execution and correct arrival are two different things.
A turn was originally arranged just right, but a change in position may cause subsequent actions to shift continuously. The program is not necessarily wrong; what may be wrong is one's own estimate of the situation when the action occurs.
The laughter produced by this is also different from casually rolling a bad number. You can see how the error passes from the previous step to the next, and you can trace where you originally wanted to go and where you began to deviate. Only when bystanders can understand this gap will everyone wait together for the subsequent actions to happen.
We can understand it as a kind of teasing that is very friendly to the desire for control. The game allows players to plan seriously and also lets planning retain the possibility of being bumped by the world. Only when you have invested thought does surprise have weight; surprise also prevents thinking from becoming silent solo calculation.
This also makes RoboRally and Magic: The Gathering form a connection amid their differences. The latter lets another unknown deck interrupt your expectations; the former lets other actions on the same board rewrite the originally estimated path.
Neither requires players to give up being clever. They merely require cleverness to retain a bit of flexibility and to acknowledge that other people's actions are also part of the world.
More importantly, failure here can be seen, explained, and even remembered together. A bad turn does not have to leave only frustration; it can also become the passage everyone still reenacts after the gathering ends.
5. Why monsters squeeze into Tokyo: both collision and reducing focused attacks
By King of Tokyo, Garfield made another question about interaction very clear.
In an interview with him, he said this work began with thinking about Yahtzee: skill can improve chances, while more casual players can still possibly win. Next, he wanted to add direct interaction to similar dice decisions.
Direct interaction has a difficulty. If every attack freely chooses a target, the game easily becomes a contest of interpersonal relationships. Who gets focused on and who is temporarily spared will occupy much of the attention that originally belonged to judging the situation.
His method was to make Tokyo a position that both offers rewards and bears risks. The monster theme was settled later; he also talked about how, after the theme was settled, redesign was still needed to make the rules and theme truly fit.
This order is interesting. We see the finished product and may first remember the noisy monsters and the city, but what supports the atmosphere is a structural question about position: if you want to stand in the center, you must accept the danger the center brings.
As players, we therefore do not have to interpret every attack as an attitude toward a particular person. Conflict has a reason everyone can see, and confrontation more easily stays within the game.
Emotions at the table also need players to take care of them together. Some enjoy intense collision, some dislike being eliminated, and some care most about whether they can control the outcome. These differences give the same game different temperatures in different gatherings and also make the designer's choice of interaction methods concrete and weighty.
From self-selected decks, to preprogramming, to contesting a dangerous position, Garfield repeatedly gives people the opportunity to exercise judgment while also letting others' actions and uncertainty continue to exist.
This path does not mean every work must replicate the scale of Magic: The Gathering. When he talked in interviews about the impact of success, he also acknowledged that the existing audience may not expect him to design lightweight family games; yet bringing fun to friends and family has always been one of his reasons for creating.
This makes me feel close to him. After a name is illuminated by a certain work, it does not mean he can only walk along that beam of light. The table can be very large or very small; the question can be about an ever-expanding card world, or simply whether a few people are willing to roll dice together tonight.
And for players already familiar with a designer's name, this also provides a way to reunderstand the works. First put fame temporarily outside the box and see what this game actually asks you to pay attention to: the resources the opponent is holding, an action that will only be executed in the future, or the risk that must be borne after standing in the center. Three kinds of attention will lead the same group of friends into three different rhythms of being together.
We sometimes describe good design as the clever layering of many rules, but here another kind of craft is visible too: finding a clear way for interaction to happen. Let people understand why collisions occur, understand what they can change, and still retain interest in the next attempt after the outcome appears. Small things like this require sitting at the table repeatedly to judge whether they truly hold up.
Returning to those two tables at the beginning, you'll find that beyond the tension there is something in common: everyone hopes their choices are meaningful, and also hopes that next time there will still be possibilities not yet clearly seen.
Richard Garfield did not eliminate all surprises for us. What he did was make people willing to enter the game with their own ideas, and then, with others' participation, discover what those ideas could still become.
[chengcheng's interactive topic]
Magic: The Gathering's combinations, RoboRally's plans going wrong, King of Tokyo's dice and positioning—which kind of uncertainty fascinates you more? Do you prefer steadily improving your odds of winning through experience, or do you prefer stories where, even after you've become skilled, the unexpected still happens?
Welcome to share your tabletop memories in the comments. I'm chengcheng, and I'll see you next time for the creator story!
#CreatorStory# #RichardGarfield# #MagicTheGathering# #KingOfTokyo# #RoboRally# #BoardGameDesign#
Sources and further reading:
- Richard Garfield himself writes: The Birth of Magic: The Gathering
- Archive of a 1993 interview with him in The Duelist
- The Opinionated Gamers: Interview on mathematics, theme, and career choices
- GamesRadar+ interview with him: How King of Tokyo went from a dice concept to a monster theme
- Hasbro: Official introduction and rules entry for RoboRally
- University of Pennsylvania Department of Mathematics: Herbert Wilf's list of PhD students
- Wizards of the Coast: Official how-to-play introduction for Magic: The Gathering